A "hidden" Kim Young-ha

I just noticed over at my e-buddy's site (Liminality) that he has a previously unpublished Kim Young-ha short story, Christmas Carol. Worth taking a look at, if you're in to Kim.

Korean Domestic Literature Continues to Flourish

Good news from the Korea Times, which managed to evade me when it first came out. The main point of this is that there is a powerful demographic of women in their 20s and 30s that is purchasing Korean Literature. I'd hope that the more they buy, the more is published and eventually, it will all trickle down to me in translation. ;-)

Korean literature is booming more than ever despite the economic downturn that has dealt a serious blow to the local publishing industry.

According to the Kyobo Bookstore, sales of Korean literature publications including poems, essays and novels dramatically increased by 35.7 percent in the first quarter over the same period last year. The number of Korean literature books sold in the same period rose 36.2 percent ....

.... New formats and patterns in Korean literature are attracting readers, especially younger women, who are the main buyers of literature books.

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I Have The Right To Destroy Myself

Kim Young-ha’s “I Have The Right To Destroy Myself” is a short novel that attempts quite a lot and achieves almost everything it attempts.

A good story, cleverly told, and one that will prove very entertaining to a casual reader as well as a critical one.

The story features multiple narrators.

Perhaps.

Kim has a rather tricky way with narrators.

In the three translated stories of his I have read, and in “I Have The Right To Destroy Myself” he sometimes pushes narrator believability to Nabokovian limits. Like Nabokov, though, he does it in such a way that a reader puts blinders on, happy enough to go for the ride directly before their eyes.

Kim never directly lets his narrator lie, but he does give his narrator a certain approach toward versimilitude:

Sometimes fiction is more easily understood than true events. Reality is often pathetic. I learned at a very young age that it was easier to make up stories to make a point. I enjoy creating stories.The world is filled with fiction anyway.

“I Have The Right To Destroy Myself” features a “narrator within a narrator” structure, in fact it features some chapters of triply embedded narrative as the omniscient "author/narrator" writes a fiction using the internal narration of characters he cannot, in reality, be in the heads of . The meta-narrator is allegedly novelizing events in which he has participated and thus using his authorial power to represent the lesser narrators. Close reading reveals that similarities exist between the meta-narrator and one of the characters, C. They are both artists, the narrator is, in a sense, a performance artist and C is a video (fairly close to performance in one sense) artist. Both are also deeply interested in aesthetics, as artists would be. Then, there is the point that their lives overlap entirely with respect to the two suicidal women who feature in the narrative.

There is also the issue of the narrator’s job. He is, by his own account, a literate and friendly version of Dr. Kervorkian. His job, more of an artistic avocation, as he explains it, is assisting suicides. The meta-narrator goes to great pains to explain his techniques for acquiring clients, and these techniques represent an ultra-winnowing effort. In fact, the meta-narrator explains his winnowing techniques both as a moral and artistic tactic to … well… create art. The narrator remains, of course, unnamed, but he speaks with the smooth assurance of a true-believer – or one who wants you to believe.

A reader gets the sense that the narrator is a true believer, but by the novel’s end the reader might still be asking themselves, a “believer of what?”

The narrator, as noted above, is an omniscient one, and he only waits until page 10 to elevate his own status (as only the all-powerful narrator can) from omniscience to Godhood. It is Kim’s skill that this monomania seems perfectly sensible, given the geography of the novel. It is also Kim’s skill, that he litters the novel with clues that the narrator is untrustworthy.

The narrator begins his tales with an ellipsis in quotation marks. As a non-Korean reader I can’t tell if this is accurate translation, but if it is, it suggests irony in the inverted commas, and editing in the ellipsis. This is all before the tale is properly begun. Perhaps the most stunning assertion of narrative omniscience the narrator makes, and one I completely missed on my first reading of the novel, is that he narrates the stories of his clients’ deaths solely through the voices of the brothers, which only the clients have met. This is an epic jump of narrative stance, from outside the narrator, through the stories of those who he has met, and to the characters who they have met – and their story represented as that of the narrator.

Then there is the issue of how and why these two, of the narrators few suicides, are related to the brothers. If the brothers were marked off, in any way, as a common thread that would push women towards suicide, this might make sense, but as it is it seems verging on the conspiratorial. Judith, the first suicide, is a troubled woman who shares (sexually) the brothers. Mimi, on the other hand, seems to be a stronger character and her connection to the brothers is finally revealed to have been through the hand of the narrator himself – if the narrator can be trusted in telling his story at two removes from himself, and even then tossing in an obscurationist meeting of the two, “He went back to the gallery. At the entrance, he saw a very familiar man, but he couldn’t place him.” The two should be very familiar, because they are separate voices of the same narrator, placed in the same time and place.

It is brilliant writing, because it pulls this hall-of-mirrors self-referentiality in an effortless and naturalistic way.

There is a hint of Mishima in Kim’s work. He does not describe mere existential angst, rather it is the point that one should live the right way which includes, particularly if bored or pointless, dying the right way. In a perverse way the unnamed narrator of the book echoes John Randolph of Roanoke’s philosophy that “life is not so important as the duties of life.”

It should also be noted that the novel is bookended by discussions of paintings of two famous death scenes, The Death of Marat and The Death of Sardanapalus. My review is on Kim’s book, so I will only note that the world gained something when Kim went into writing, and lost nothing when he did not go into art-criticism. His reading of the visual pull of Delacroix’s work is dead wrong.

I end with one of Kim's concluding symbols – fake flowers. The author describes Mimi’s death and then says the novel he will write (the very book we hold in our hands) “will be a beautiful fake flower arrangement that will be place on their graves.” The fake-flower notion is introduced late in the novel and it, as Kim does throughout the novel, seems to interrogate the notion of the narrator as an artist and as someone whose aesthetic decisions can be trusted.

Still, you close the back cover of this book and you wish that, maybe, there had been a bit more. The clever balances, the counterpoised aesthetics, the omniscient narrator whose omniscience is possibly unmoored from reality, the brilliant narrative itself, the alternately propulsive and comfortably numb plot, all of these combine in a uniquely satisfying way.

One of the Grand Things about the Korea Journal

Is that it has a searchable database which includes a variety of cool short stories in the PDF format. A while ago I reviewed Yi Sang's "The Wings" and lo and behold you can download it right here. The "read this article" link doesn't seem to work, but the "Download PDF" link seems to work just fine.

I suppose I could have made the link to the PDF, but that seems a bit too deep-linked, if you know what I mean.

The general search function for any literature, review, or article, is right here...

worth checking out.

LAND OF EXILE

As I've expanded on some bits of this, I thought I'd blog the whole thing. It was first published in Acta Koreana in June, 2008.

The expanded edition of “Land of Exile” (first published in 1993, republished by M.E. Sharpe), translated and edited by the late Marshall Pihl, and Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton, takes a very good, but slightly dated anthology, and with an infusion of four new stories improves the quality of the original volume while simultaneously bringing it into the twenty-first century. The new stories substantially broaden the brief of the anthology, expanding the narrative styles as well as extending the geography of exile that constitutes the main theme of the collection.

A reader of the first edition might be forgiven for assuming that all Korean fiction was about exile. There was a tension between the anthologies’ tight focus on exile and realism, and its self-proclaimed status as “the standard English-language anthology of post-1945 Korean short fiction.” The anthology still revolves around exile, but it has extended its purview beyond only the specific Korean exilic experience, and on to more generalized experiences of alienation. This expansion should make the collection accessible to a broader range of readers.

This new edition also brings the anthology current. The first edition had a balance of stories from the years between 1948 and 1984. This is an interesting symmetry, but one that left the anthology without representation from one-third of the post-colonial era. The new edition adds a story from the 1980’s, one from the 1990’s, and two from the new millennium. These additions allow “Land of Exile” to properly assume the crown Thomas Hughes grants it as “the richest, most comprehensive selection of postcolonial South Korean short fiction currently available.”

Two themes thread in and out of the short stories in “Land of Exile” – collaboration, and cyclicality. Collaborators stud these works and while collaborators are exiles in one sense, they are also a particular and protean kind of exile. These works show collaborators at work on all levels of society and with a wide range of intents. The consistent theme of cyclicality in these tightly drawn dramas suggest that they are merely showing one turn of the wheel, but that the wheel will continue to turn. Some of the pain contained in these stories is exacerbated because the author allows no possibility of future alteration. These stories dramatically remind us that the theoretical concept of contested terrain is an ethereal version of what contested terrain amounts to in the geography of real life. This is one of the powers of this fiction – although it never precisely happened, it gives us glimpses of the humane and the inhumane.

The stories published in the previous edition are largely powerful reading and primarily examples of the “tight” exilic theme. Three of the original works are not as substantial as their companions. “The Wife and Children,” by Ch’ae Manshik is a trifle of a story. With its ‘returning-only-to-exit’ husband, and confused wife and child, it is short on character motivation and of light emotional impact. Kim Tongni’s “The Post Horse Curse” also seems a bit light for the topic of the anthology. Its plot is a hoary “mistaken identity” one that seems heavy-handed and obvious even as it is read. Finally, “Land of Exile,” the story for which the collection is named, may be its weakest story. In attempting to concatenate subplots of an alternately bitter and sentimental old man leaving his son at a orphanage, going home to die, two instances of family betrayal, and several turns of the revolutionary wheel, author Cho Chongnae simultaneously attempts too much and too little. “Land of Exile” is overwhelmed by a soap-opera plot and clumsy dialogue.

Kim Sungok’s “Seoul: 1964, Winter” is much more successful and was recognized as something new in Korean Literature immediately upon publication. It is, as its anomic title indicates, existential, nearly ludicrous, and represents a first step away from an ultra-narrow focus on traditional exile. Two young men meet an older man and attempt to spend the money he has received for selling his wife’s corpse. After reading this story it comes as no surprise to learn that Kim studied French Literature and apparently, learned some of its lessons well. The three men meet as atoms might collide. Just as when atoms do collide, they create a short heat and careen apart. An outstanding work and one whose title, unfortunately, was not suited to be used as the name of an anthology.

The remaining stories are also excellent. Hwang Sunwon’s “Mountains” is an impressive and brutal tale featuring, in shifting third-person narration, multiple levels of exile and a relentless ending suggesting the cycle of exile is unbreakable. When the narrator receives the advice, “As long as you live in the mountains watch out for large animals – don’t even think of going near them,” neither he nor the reader cannot foresee that this exilic advice extends to the largest of animals, man.

“Kapitan Ri”, by Chon Kwangyong, is a remarkably cheery portrayal of collaboration. Dr. Yi Inguk is a collaborator with a “can-do” attitude extending to everyone except Koreans. He is exuberantly proud of past collaborations and the story is partly of his accepting his new collaborators. Yi reminisces on the fruits of collaboration with the Japanese, recounts how he came to terms with the Soviets, and realizes that the American “big-noses” are another such opportunity despite his discomfort that his daughter is marrying one. Yun Hunggil’s “The Man Who Was Left as Nine Pairs of Shoes” implies that anyone can become collaborator - the unfortunate character of the title notes that “There are times when you can do something you wanted absolutely no part of, and not even realize it …Just because you haven’t cooperated [with the police] in the past doesn’t mean you won’t cooperate [with the police] in the future”

Pak Wanso’s “Winter Outing” is a sobering mixture of personal alienation and a horrific story of the impact of political bifurcation. An alienated wife travels to the country and meets a heartbreaking victim of internecine Korean brutality. O Chonghui’s “The Bronze Mirror” and Im Cho’ru’s “A Shared Journey” are linked by their consideration of the cost of rebellion and ensuing exile. In “The Bronze Mirror” an elderly couple live with memory of their son, killed twenty years earlier in the April 1960 student revolution. “A Shared Journey” by Im Cho’ru, tells a story subsequent to the 5.18 Massacre in Kwangju. When one protagonist still on the run and another uneasily settled back into day-to-day life meet, they find that once common ground has become mysterious and obscured. Physical exile and return mirrors the exile and return of unfortunate memories.

Hwang Sogyong’s “A Dream of Good Fortune” is reminiscent of Choi Se-Hui’s “The Dwarf” without that work’s relentless depression. “A Dream of Good Fortune” is a tightly realistic depiction of the marginal life of the underclass. It is notable for it’s description of how, on social and economic margins, small events are of magnified importance. The plot revolves around the unlikely combination of the pregnancy of a family member and the neighborhood joy brought by coming into the possession of a dead dog.

“The Boozer,” by Ch’oe Inho, is a story of loss and delusion. The unnamed narrator is a young boy searching for his drunken father. The tale is told in semi-fantastic narration in which verb tenses slip from the present, to the past, and back to the present, and the impossible is presented as real (“You know, once he took copper and made it into gold. Gold!" ). The nature of the boy’s quest alters subtly through the course of events, and the ending is poignant, suggesting the story is one day of an endless cycle in lives that also endlessly cycle.

It is the four new stories -- "Scarlet Fingernails" (1987) by Kim Minsuk; "The Last of Hanak'o" (1992) by Ch'oe Yun; "Conviction" (2003) by Ch'oe Such'ol; and "From Powder to Powder" (2004) by Kim Hun -- that extend the metaphor of “exile” so far as to make it stand for a more general alienation. This allows the anthology to dramatically increase its range. In a review of the original volume, Kevin O’Rourke noted that “People keep saying ‘Korean fiction is not much fun’ … one feels bound to point out that until Korean fiction becomes fun to read it will not make much of a mark on the international stage.” While the new stories are serious, sometimes harrowing, they are also fun in the literary sense: These fictions play with expectations and expand forms. These works, though difficult, are ‘fun’ to read.

Of the new works, "Scarlet Fingernails" hews the closest to the traditional Korean narrative of exile; in fact its subject explicitly is exile. It is a family story written in a style that balances the exuberant and tragic. "Scarlet Fingernails" tells the tale of a wife and daughter (and her husband and children) who have repudiated a ‘communist’ husband and father who defected to the North. This defection ruined their careers and that he returned to the South and was promptly imprisoned, has antagonized them more. Now, on his 61st birthday, an event of some importance to Koreans, everyone must come to some kind of terms. The conclusion is surprisingly light-hearted, which makes this work unusual among its companions.

"The Last of Hanak'o" is a story of a different kind of exile and the main plot turn at its end may not come as a complete surprise to a Western reader. Yet Yun handles the narrative and plot deftly. "The Last of Hanak'o" concludes with an additional half-twist that gives the story a masterful partial inversion of the typical story of exile. By the conclusion of “The Last of Hanak’o” it is unclear who is exiled from whom, and who has done the exiling. It is also worth noting that this is the only story of the collection set in a foreign land. This reflects the Korean reality that exile is very often an intra-national affair and thus where Korean writers typically focus, as well the fact that the new edition of this anthology is stretching such traditional boundaries.

“Conviction” is positively J.G. Ballardian and teases the contention of the introduction that the anthology does not contain extra-reality (“Boozer” also contains surreal touches, particularly in descriptions of exteriors and in its young narrator’s internal monologue). The introduction to “Life In Exile” notes that “Conviction” tells the story of “a man whose mind and body are increasingly but subtly estranged,” and compares it, properly, to Ambrose Bierce’s “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.” That comparison surely suggests that Ch’oe’s goes beyond specific issues of Korean exile and into general issues of body and mind? “Conviction” is a compelling story of a man’s struggle, conceived of as a competition between water and desiccation. The story weaves a web in spiders, sand, the River Styx, mold, and the death of a childhood playmate by drowning. The final image is literally arresting.

The concluding story, “Powder to Powder” hammers a cyclical message home with bleak nihilism, leavened by flashes of alarming humor. The story begins at the deathwatch of an advertising executive’s wife. The death scenes are harrowing, and the conclusion is even more so. At a crematorium the theme of cycles and alienation is mechanical and explicit:

A display:

Incineration 121: Will the bereaved please come to the observation room to receive the ashes.
Incineration 122: Cycle to end 130 PM
Incineration 123 Cycle to end 1:40 PM


After the death of the narrator’s wife, a series of unexpected but not unlikely events result in the narrator severing all personal connections. The narrator concludes with a passage that can be read as a threat, a Buddhist promise of nirvana, or simple banal evil. “That night, for the first time in a long while, I slept deeply, ever so deeply, my awareness dissipating into nothingness.”

As a grateful reader of works translated from Korean, I should take a moment to praise the wonderful literary quality of this translation. The text is smooth and elegantly idiomatic while the essentially Korean nature of the works comes through cleanly. In addition the editors have, particularly with the inclusion of the recent four stories, done an outstanding job choosing stories that will engage western readers. The Introduction seems to need a slight overhaul - it is adapted from the original introduction and still has too much of that genetic material in it. But beyond that minor point, the upgrade to the volume is substantial and impressive. It may be a bit premature to hope for, but I already look forward to what the next edition will bring or, even better, to the next volume of short stories newly translated and anthologized by the Fultons.

Not Exactly All About Korea - but first reviews in "10 Magazine Asia"

Three little ones - the problem was actually to get them down to 150 words and still say something. I guess I'm a wordy writer. These will publish next month.

THE APPEAL
John Grisham

Summer reading season is here. On Gwangali or Boryeong beach, or huddled by your air-conditioner, you can count on John Grisham to deliver a solid summer book; a long story, simply told, in which the bad guys are really, really bad. “The Appeal” delivers page-turning plot and doesn’t let anything interfere. If a character is evil his chauffeur describes him as “ a hothead with a massive ego,” and the action speeds ahead.

“The Appeal” focuses on a small legal firm that has just defeated the deep-pocketed and evil Krane Chemical company. Krane responds with a multi-pronged counterattack hinging on the increasing politicization of the judicial election system and a Machiavellian manipulation of unrelated social issues. The story races towards a satisfyingly downbeat conclusion and with the exception of a few clunky phrases and occasional caricature, is a brilliant choice for beach or sofa. (482 pages, 10,390₩)


THE AQUARIUMS OF PYONGYANG
Chol-hwan Kang & Pierre Rigoulot


“The Aquariums of Pyongyang” tells of a childhood partially spent in a North Korean internment camp. Chol-hwan Kang, recounts his happy childhood in a family that moved to North Korea from Japan. The family arrives as heroes. When the patriarch turns against the state he ‘disappears’ and the family is exiled to camp Yodok. Nine year-old Kang spends ten years struggling to remain alive. Starvation, beatings, overwork and disease are daily fare at the camp, and sensitive readers might flinch as Kang unsparingly recounts his experiences with hunger, sadism, and “the death of compassion.” Kang’s family is finally released, but the specter of re-internment never leaves. Kang escapes to China and then to South Korea. The book’s conclusion, preface and introduction (the last by Pierre Rigoulot) contain some political posturing, which seems hard-earned and does little to lessen the book’s general impact. (238 pages, 14,400 ₩)

LAND OF EXILE
Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton eds.

Readers looking for a quick but comprehensive primer on Korean post-WWII short fiction should purchase a copy of the updated “Land of Exile.” A semi-canonical work within fifteen years of its first publication, four new stories substantially broaden the brief of the anthology, expanding the narrative styles as well as extending the geography of exile that constitutes the main theme of the collection. Co-editors and translators Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton have added "Scarlet Fingernails" by Minsuk Kim; "The Last of Hanak'o" by Yun Ch'oe; "Conviction"(2003) by Such'ol Ch'oe; and "From Powder to Powder" (2004) by Hung Kim. According to Amazon.com, none of the stories in this anthology are in print in any other volume. The “Land of Exile” continues to wear the crown Thomas Hughes grants it as “the richest, most comprehensive selection of postcolonial South Korean short fiction currently available.” (343 pages, 37,640₩)

Kim Yu Jeong .... The Camellias

The Portable Library of Korean Literature • Short Fiction • 14 • Jimoondang Publishing • Seoul

I read my first stories of Kim Yu-Jeong while concurrently reading the essay Extravagance and Authenticity by Kim Uchang. This proved an interesting set of readings as the essay and the stories focus on romantic love.

Kim Uchang’s essay follows the development of “free-love” as a new cultural artifact in Korea at the start of the 20th century. He is particularly interested (his modern politics, perhaps, showing) in demonstrating that this notion was external, initially quite artificial, and largely at the expense of women. Kim Uchang argues his points on the basis of the works of Yi Gwang-su, Kim Dong-in, Yeong Sang-seop (who wrote the critically noted and important “Three Generations”) and how they demonstrate the artificiality of the notion of romantic love Korea at the turn of the (previous) century.

This notion, of course, can be overplayed, since works as old as Yi-Saeng Peers Through the Wall clearly displayed a notion of romantic love untied from social status or the onus of social procedures. Yi-Saeng would have been written just about the time the crusades were going on just a bit to the west, so romantic love does have some pedigree in Korea dating back further than Kim Uchang discusses. And Kim Yu-jeong’s stories all seem to focus on a fairly pure ‘romantic’ love. I am too new at Korean fiction to assess if this is a function of how Kim Yu-jeong chose his subjects, or if Kim Uchang is over-simplifying. Updates, I suppose, to follow.

Kim Yu-jeong describes love, in stories that are brutal and simple. The liner notes say that Kim “sought his own way of describing … unfriendly reality by composing dark yet humorous stories that usually portray the persevering spirit in the underclass life.”

All three stories are resolutely focused on love and although the stories are not western in any sense, they all describe a love that seems, to a modern eye, a “free” one. In The Camellias love is chosen across class lines, in The Scorching Heat love is tragically lost to a fate as simple as nature, and in A Wanderer in the Valleys we see a love that causes a wife to metaphorically risk every wolf in the human valley.

The Camellias is a “first-love” story in which a rather bumpkin-ish boy confronts Jeomsun a rather higher class girl who loves him. The tone is rough and humorous as Jeomsun is only capable of showing her interest through aggression – the “potato incident” and the “cockfight” being two of the more amusing cases of her sublimated love. The young love is complicated, too, by the fact that Jeomsun is the narrator’s social superior, and this causes him to see Jeomsun’s solicitude and aggression as a form of class warfare. Of course it is, in a way, as Jeomsun pulls stunts that would get a social equal smacked on the head, but Kim plays this for broad comedy and the unnamed narrator’s denseness nearly justifies the lengths that Jeomsun feels she has to go to in order to demonstrate her love. The story ends happily, with the narrator in a symbolic fashion, crawling towards a greater destiny: “I had no choice but to crawl away on hands and knees, up along the rocks towards the mountain peak.”

Kim Uchang may argue that romantic love was a bad match for the early 1900s in Korea, but The Camellias playfully argues that romantic love was a feature of Korean culture at the time.

The Scorching Heat is a sad story, and unleavened by humor. Deoksun, a loving husband physically carries his ill wife on his back, to a hospital that he believes will cure, and pay, her. The story is a detailed pointillist achievement of encroaching despair. When, at the end, the husband and wife walk back to their home, the wife crying on Deoksun’s back and outlining her final wishes, the deep love the two share is nearly heartbreaking. The last sentence, a brilliant concoction of multiple short phrases, and cascading punctuation, puts the tragic message of the story home: This love may not end, but one life assuredly will.

A Wanderer in the Valleys falls somewhere between the other two stories. A wandering woman enters a small settlement, revitalizes a drinking establishment, and marries the son of the owner. On her wedding night she reveals where her true love lies and at the stories’ end Kim gives us a vision of a world threatening and closing in on the narrator, “From all around the howling of wolves drifted down, echoing among the valleys and hills”

One thing I should note, is that liner notes refer to Kim’s “colloquial dialect” and “humor.” On the plot level I could see this, but in terms of writing style, little of this came through the translation for me, and when a bilingual Korean friend noticed the book on my coffee table she picked it up and began to leaf through it. She dropped it back onto the table in about three minutes and said, “This doesn’t sound anything like the original story.” So, perhaps there may be a few translation problems here, although the broader outlines of the humor do come through a bit, particularly in The Camellias.

Finally, I should also note that Kim Yu-Jeong was a college dropout, and like Yi-Sang, died tragically young – at age 29, from consumption.

Wow.. a complete literary smackdown..

Cheryl Miller puts the hammer of the Gods to Paul Fisher.

She attacks, rightly, the modern notion that it it useful to attribute all the sins a critic can find in their own head, onto the artists that they review. A sample passage of the review.

Fisher is convinced that he is on the cutting-edge of literary interpretation, that his "intimate portrait" of the Jameses is new. The introduction is full of such self-congratulation. "Few people talked or wrote about the most intimate issues in the Jameses' lives: mental illness, alcoholism, love, sex, homosexuality, money"; "there has been little frank discussion about the Jameses in love," etc., etc. Previous biographers might have done "superlative," even "meticulous, monumental" work, but none of them is the bold slayer of myths our author claims to be.

And that is the polite bit!

She massacres this book so profoundly that it might actually cause me to purchase the thing to see the wreckage.

Marketing by assassination.

Fucking Brilliant!